An Unbiased Neutral News App

Background:

This 10-week group project for my Graduate School Design Thinking class allowed our team to conduct user research, synthesize data, identify common themes and craft solutions based on our findings. Our group was originally formed to interrogate issues surrounding people’s dependence upon technology. We began with a broad grouping of issues—on the machine side, both hardware and software, and on the human side, the social norms that our technological reliance has influenced as well as its impact on the mental and emotional health of users. specifically, we wanted to research the many ways users locate their typical news information.

Process:

1) Interviews:

For our team to develop a specific focus in this topic area, we conducted various user interviews to initially gauge user’s everyday use of technology and social media connection. As a group, we interviewed 13 different people across a week-long period.

2) Initial Synthesis:

After conducting all interviews, we held our first synthesis session to discuss out findings and identify any common themes and issues seen across our interview pool. To do this, we used Mural to organize and display all captured research data. After collecting all information, we analyzed our findings to locate one common problem: trust in technology. From this problem, we crafted the problem statement that would carry through the rest of the project:

How can we influence more people to trust technology, while also influencing technology to be more trustworthy?

3) Ideation:

Once we came into agreement of our problem statement, our next goal was to make some solutions. To start this process, we held a brainstorming session and came up with 25 unique “popcorn-style” ideas to solve the problem. After those initial ideas, we started another layer of brainstorming which involved merging ideas together to craft thorough solutions.

4) Prototype:

The results of this session gave our team 3 unique prototypes to compare to solve this problem. The prototype I crafted was called Technology Public Affairs Network (T-Pan)—an unbiased, net neutral app with the mission of revealing transparent information on tech companies. This concept works to build people’s trust in tech companies. To do this, T-Pan allows users to easily see unbiased reporting and unified representations of companies’ policies and data usage practices.

This prototype was crafted with the following popcorn ideas:

• the ability to have a C-SPAN like neutral news and facts source for companies

• implementing a blockchain-like oversight system to keep companies in check (Block Chain)

• a “nutrition label”-like system to obtain an overview of what data selected companies collect from users (Tech Facts)

Three mock-ups were created to signify its primary features.

The first feature was a newsfeed which would show relevant news articles, which would be published exclusively by T-Pan. This prevents any bias for or against any company.

The second feature revealed rankings across all registered companies on four factors: Trustworthiness, Practices, Impact, and Transparency. T-Pan would derive this data from the news sources fed into the system by its own news app.

The third feature was a detailed view of a company and how it used users’ data. All mock-ups were created with a software called MockFlow.

5) Test:

Each of our mock-ups were tested with two users, which were previously interviewed. For T-Pan, I had users assess the mock-ups on their personal devices. The mock-up files were shared as PDFs so they could experience them on their own device. For testing, we had 3 scenarios:

■Scenario 1 - User wants to view unbiased news surrounding updates & policies from tech companies.

■Scenario 2 - User wants to learn the rating of technology company.

■Scenario 3 - User wants to find out how a company uses their submitted data.

The design of T-Pan was tested with two unique individuals (User A & User B) and received the following feedback:

General

• User A thought that the app in general was good. They weren’t sure where the Home Page was located and was looking for one. Initially, it was assumed the Top News section could be the Home Page.

• User B did mention that, with using this theoretical app, that they would put more trust in technology.

Scenario 1

• User B enjoyed the simplicity of the news structure

Scenario 2

• User A & B both loved the concept of the Tech Facts section. It was easy to understand the ratings & the layout. This reminded User B about the Better Business Bureau, an organization that does the similar thing with small businesses. Some other suggestions for stats to track were “Satisfaction” and “Workmanship”.

Scenario 3

• User B mentioned that they believe that this page can assist users who aren’t as tech adept to understand more about a company. They also stated that this section would be a good reference tool…not a feature you’d have to routinely check.